Andy Davidson > Quotes

“The girl sang with the voice of a child, but it was not hers. It was a rough voice, harsh with grief, and the words she sang were in Baba’s deep, guttural tongue, and the song she sang was long and terrible in its warp and weft, as if torn out of the peat-smelling earth itself.”
― Andy Davidson, The Boatman's Daughter

“A born witch carries power in her blood. Secrets, old and eternal. Nothing like a man’s secrets, which are petty. Fleeting. My father’s secrets were not even secrets at all. The men, they knew he was cruel. That his fists fell against Hana Krupin when he drank. They knew. But men, Myshka, look after men.”
― Andy Davidson, The Boatman's Daughter

“It’s a hard thing on a man,” Calhoun offered, “to watch his dreams wither on the vine.” “A man’s dreams are hard on a woman, too, Mr. Calhoun.”
― Andy Davidson, In the Valley of the Sun

“She saw an older wound near his groin and palpated it and saw into the slit where layers of pink tissue should have been, but there was only an ashen sheaf of meat, like the pages of a book half-burned.”
― Andy Davidson, In the Valley of the Sun

“Riddle put his hand over the man’s mouth and nose, almost gently, felt the sputter of his breath, the dampness of his face. “We should of been friends,” Riddle said. He pinched the nose and clamped the mouth shut, and when the man began to struggle, Riddle dropped to his knees and put his whole weight into the task, and he felt the man beneath him wanting not to die, the muscles tensing, the body pushing against him with everything it had, and it was almost a kind of miracle healing, like bringing a man back from the dead instead of sending him there, the way the biker’s broken body fought against the end. Finally, the fight went out, and the man lay still beneath the constable’s hand.”
― Andy Davidson, The Boatman's Daughter

“smelled of booze and smoke and rotten meat and he felt its corn-husk skin against his own, hands groping at his belt, loosening his buckle, sliding it free.”
― Andy Davidson, In the Valley of the Sun

“A splay of lightning like veins lit the sky. Travis fled the porch and did not look back. Annabelle sat in the swing.”
― Andy Davidson, In the Valley of the Sun

“She died.”
― Andy Davidson, The Boatman's Daughter

“He prefers the book to the movie version with Boris Karloff, if only because there’s something so much scarier about a monster who can plot and scheme, a monster who’s smart. Midafternoon,”
― Andy Davidson, The Hollow Kind

“He prayed, as people long bereft of belief will pray, the belief having lain dormant, awaiting some moment of terror such as this to germinate it, to bring forth a shoot so delicate and small and dear.”
― Andy Davidson, The Boatman's Daughter

“Reader backed slowly down the drive and cruised through the empty, dark streets, feeling, as he always did when waking in the early a.m. hours, that the world did not belong to men but was somehow its own keeper, and he was but one small part in some greater mystery, and the silence of everything was but a solemn hush before it. He”
― Andy Davidson, In the Valley of the Sun

“At twilight, he pulled off for gas in a wasted town where the wind never ceased banging metal against metal.”
― Andy Davidson, In the Valley of the Sun

“There is no comfort to be had in any truth here. I hope you’ll remember that when you write your reports.”
― Andy Davidson, In the Valley of the Sun

“No one misses them. I once ate a priest in Savannah, Georgia, she thinks. Christmas, 1954. I lured him down to the river, away from his Bible and his God. I touched him and he saw in me the true eternal.”
― Andy Davidson, In the Valley of the Sun

“They watched the rain pour from the eaves of their tin roofs to wear away the mud below and saw in this the promise of their own slow annihilation, their fates tied inextricably to the land they or some long-lost forebear had claimed.”
― Andy Davidson, The Boatman's Daughter

“A man’s dreams are hard on a woman, too, Mr. Calhoun.”
― Andy Davidson, In the Valley of the Sun

“This,” she said, picking up the head, a runnel of blood and tissue and the candy-pink mouth yet open, “is the only way to deal with a snake.”
― Andy Davidson, The Boatman's Daughter

“Sunglasses to hide the burst capillaries in her eyes, the ones that come when the blood no longer tolerates the hunger and turns its red teeth upon itself like the mad, crazed thing it is, and the body turns to dust and dying. Four days now without fresh blood.”
― Andy Davidson, In the Valley of the Sun

“A cage is safety, she thought, but safety is a cage.”
― Andy Davidson, In the Valley of the Sun

“He thought of Rue. A dried rose dropping brittle petals.”
― Andy Davidson, In the Valley of the Sun

“Travis gathered them both into a stall, mother and boy, and put the boy in his mother’s arms on the toilet. Intertwining their limbs, their bodies cold. The woman held her son against her breast, protective of the child even in death, the boy’s cheek resting on her shoulder. He had never done anything like this before and he did it now for reasons he could not have said. It was how he had always imagined his own reunion: he would find her, she would hold him. Mother and child, together forever.”
― Andy Davidson, In the Valley of the Sun

“For him, the world was now a picture knocked crooked. He could barely judge the ground beneath his boots and the stars in the sky shimmered and blurred and became long straight lines of light, as if time itself were stretching to the breaking.”
― Andy Davidson, In the Valley of the Sun